I took advantage of the sale and finally bought OstFront. I had previously played and enjoyed the CC series like CCBB etc and was mainly disappointed in the lack of a campaign; which is why I finally boughr OstFront. Having "lurked" on the forums earlier I saw one of the greatest problems was the ludicrously high effectiveness of Off-board Arty, and declined to buy the game at that point. Noting the claimed changes with the patches I decided to give it a go and now buy the game. My first two runs through the Tutorial have had 82mm Mor barrages destroying two halftracks and One inf section (Inf stationary in the woods), and disabling two PzIIIh's , the second run through much the same. I respect the effectiveness of Arty but 82mm Mor on moving tanks and Half tracks ..... c'mon ..... I shudder to think of what real arty will do. Will go read some AAR's but this feels very wrong.

I took advantage of the sale and finally bought OstFront. I had previously played and enjoyed the CC series like CCBB etc and was mainly disappointed in the lack of a campaign; which is why I finally boughr OstFront. Having "lurked" on the forums earlier I saw one of the greatest problems was the ludicrously high effectiveness of Off-board Arty, and declined to buy the game at that point. Noting the claimed changes with the patches I decided to give it a go and now buy the game. My first two runs through the Tutorial have had 82mm Mor barrages destroying two halftracks and One inf section (Inf stationary in the woods), and disabling two PzIIIh's , the second run through much the same. I respect the effectiveness of Arty but 82mm Mor on moving tanks and Half tracks ..... c'mon ..... I shudder to think of what real arty will do. Will go read some AAR's but this feels very wrong.

Regards,

AKL

The 82mm mortars can be effective if you don't move the HT's out of the open. Immobilizing two of the Pz IIIs in one turn is pretty unlucky.

Read some of the biographies. "Tigers in the Mud" by Otto Carius, for instance, states they hated Russian mortars worse than anything. When the mortars hit them it was on the thin engine plates of the top deck. Instantly knocking out the tank. Tiger tanks that Soviet tank guns couldn't kill, taken out by 82mm mortars.

Sound familiar?

There is a tremendous amount of misconception, in the general wargame population, about just how hard, or easy, it is to knock out a tank. And how different weapons systems will affect one. Normally, it's not the size of the gun used to hit the tank that determines the end result but where the tank was hit.

Any artillery against half tracks is a disaster for the Germans. They can't take a hit of any size mortar and live. Immobilizing the tanks is also good. That's a much better result than tanks getting killed in the earlier versions of the game.

This game is not perfect. But it's way better than it was when we started. If we are given the opportunity, it will get better yet.

Read all the AAR's you like. Just remember those were written before this patch was released. My recommendation to you is to play the game a few times and see how it feels to you after a few plays through. I think you'll find if you invest the time into this game it will give you a great gaming experience. [&o]

Don't bunch up. If all your units were taken under fire by the same battery at the same time they were too close together. Our artillery is maybe a little too accurate as a general on-call artillery. However, artillery can be very accurate if it is pre-registered.

MR: I have read and own 'Tigers in the Mud'. As far as the mortars 'Instantly knocking out the tank', this is incorrect. The mortars punched some holes in one of the radiators. This made the Tiger tanks conditionally operational since they could move for short distances at a time before over-heating.

The Tiger was not 'Knocked Out'. It still had it's engine. It just had a hole in it's radiator. It still had a full crew, working main gun and MG's, and limited mobility. The game even models limited mobility.

A knocked out tank in my opinion is out of the immediate fight. Either destroyed or abandoned. But it seems you have another opinion of a knocked out tank.

My point is what if the mortar round hits closer? More shrapnel to the radiator, or on the engine deck? If the tank becomes immobilized it is a dead vehicle in my opinion. The records show that more tanks were abandoned by their crews in combat than were a total "kill". Not by a small number.

That's due to a lot of things. Many of them mechanical; several of them psychological. The point is, it doesn't matter why a tank stops functioning. As you point out there are a larger number of operational conditions for a tank to be in. Even though we are talking tanks here, in WWII, they were fairly fragile vehicles. They tended to break down a lot. (A mechanical reliability factor and fuel factor is something you may see in future games of the series.) [X(]

In the case of a tiger with a hole in the radiator, how badly that causes the tank to overheat may make the crew leave the battlefield with it. We don't force vehicle retreats off the map, nor do we have you abandon the vehicle if it throws a track, the vehicle doesn't leave if it takes excessive damage to sensitive systems or takes a turret ring hit. We compensate in other ways. We did what we could. [:)]

I'm glad to see you back YN. I hope you have the game working and it's giving you a good game.

Tiger I vehicles were vulnerable to DIRECT hits by mortar fire on the rear deck. A ground burst by a mortar round, even one right next to the Tiger, is not going to hole the radiator. In the case of Tigers in the Mud, the author states they were given the mission of staying in place as anti-tank assets. Using the Tiger I this way meant it was basically a unmoving target for quite awhile. Getting a rear deck hit on a Tiger I by a mortar would take a large number of rounds under most circumstances.

Other AFV, including the Panzer III that was in the initial post, had baffled and overlapping armor and were not as vulnerable to this effect on the Tiger. So you are really using an outlier in your argument in regards to AFV being vulnerable to something like 81mm mortar fire.

I would suggest that simple testing of the game would prove out how vulnerable tanks are to 81mm mortar fire. In real life, the amount of explosive and fragmentation size/velocity would have very little effect. I have seen video of US tankers changing out a road wheel on a sherman after a direct hit by a Japanese 81mm mortar landing right next to it. The track was not broken and the wheel was a bit mangled but it ran.

We are talking about 82mm vs. Panzer III not vs. Tigers. There is no way to knock out a Tiger with 82mm mortars in PCO. The top turret of a PZIII is vulnerable to 82mm fire though the chance is ~4% for each hit. The deck is not vulnerable. Don't forget the armor of the top turret is 10-12mm while the deck is 16-17mm.

That would be a statistically unlikely event for a 82mm mortar to KO a Panzer III.

In reality, there would be two scenarios, depending on the fuse setting. The first would be the mortar bomb on SQ or superquick. The mortar bomb would detonate on the surface of the top of the turret. This would have virtually no chance of penetrating the steel-armor. When a 82mm mortar bomb explodes, the fragments are fairly small and directed away from the sides of the bomb. About the best case for an event like this is if a crewmen inside had his head right under the armor plate that was struck. The concussion might knock him out or take him out of the fight entirely. Of course, a tank commander or other crewmen with his head unbuttoned would be in for a surprise. It's also possible that armored glass might be shattered or degraded.

If the mortar bomb is set on Delay, then the mortar might act as some poorly designed penetrator first before exploding. Since mortar bombs are thin walled cast-iron, and the roof of the tank is armored-steel, I would venture that the body of the mortar bomb would get the worst of it and possibly ricochet away to explode.

81/82mm mortar bombs are generally good for making AFV button up. It takes real projectile weight to be a threat to a tank. Most blast type weapons need direct hits. Weapons like 150mm class artillery do most of their damage through the fragmentation effect. German doctrine was to separate the Soviet tanks from the tank riders and supporting infantry. Mortars did this very well. Being on top of a tank when mortars are exploding makes you extremely vulnerable to the fragments.

Here I've combined two different figures from the US Technical Manual TM 9-1907. The upper figure shows the blast pattern and from the US 81mm mortar. Figure 1 is a cross-section. The red line would be the horizontal surface of what might be the armor of the turret or deck. Most of the blast pattern goes above this line but some is directed downward. Table XXXI shows that a 20 ft. fragments can penetrate 1/4" of mild steel. In contact with the plate a 0 ft. there is a chance that the equivalent 1/2" of mild steel could be penetrated or spalled and scabs of armor could be driven off the insides. If next to fuel or batteries this could start fires. Besides the shock and overpressure injected into an enclosed space like a tank turret can incapacitate the crew.

They don't have a blast pattern for the lighter (6.9lb.) 81mm M43A1 but there is a fragment velocity table. Here a far fewer number of fragments can penetrate the 1/4" mild plate at 20ft. Still some can. The heavier (7.48lb.) 82mm Russian mortar bomb would do better.

A very noteworthy aspect of Soviet high explosive ammunition is the use of cast iron in both mortar end artillery H.E. shell as seen from the data shown in Table Vi. The extreme brittleness of cast iron enhances the fragmentation characteristics of this Material; a shell of cast iron may produce up to 20 times as many fragments upon detonation as a similar shell made from forged steel. The fragments recovered from one detonated 82 MM wortar shell are shown in Figure 11. This shell, for exauiple, produced more than 10,000 fragments upon detonation. Although, of course, a very large proportion of these fragments are fines weighing less than 2 grains (approxiimately 7500 fragments Pre in this classification), a very large number of these fragments may be effective at casualty producing agents. Even very tiny fragments are capable of producing severe casualties as weil as deaths as attested to by the surveys made by medical teams in , Korea during the periods when field trials of experiental body armior garments were conducted prior to the standardizvtion of this type of cquipment. The 82mm Soviet wortar shell also produced approximately i600 fragments weighing from 2 to 5 grains, 850 fragments weighing from 5 to 10 grains, 700 fragmaents weighing l0 to 25 grains, and l00 fragments weighing 25 to 50 grains. Fragments in these weight ranges are particularly effective against personnel. Competitive firing tests of the Soviet 82 MM cast iron and the American 81 MM M43A1 forged steel mortar shell have been conducted at Aberdeen proving ground where the shell were detonated in the center of 1" pine boards arranged in semicircles of 20 foot and 40 foot radii. The following results were obtained: 82 MM Soviet 81 MM American Mortar Shell M43A1 mortar Shell 20' radius Total hits 5891 734 Total perforations 1435 333 40' radius Total hits 2513 277 Total perforations 824 102

I would gladly drive through an area while a mortar desperately tries to hit the field I am in, let alone the tank itself. Dispersion and the long time of flight makes hitting a moving vehicle a matter of pure luck. Of course, I would gladly grind the mortar under my tracks once I reached it.

Well...You know that the Russians fielded a ****load of mortars and they were very much respected by the Germans...I definetely wouldnt want to be caught in a big barrage of mortars no matter what the Hell I was in. [;)] Remember this is a game...and believe it or not...weird things can happen. I have even heard of Mortars landing in open hatches...Rare...But...As the old saying goes...."**** HAPPENS"! LOL

Someone could make a mod to increase the killpower value by one but reduce the penetration factor by say 0.2. Similarly, I think the 120mm mortar of both the Russian and Germans also had cast iron mortar bomb body. See what how things work.

I'm not sure the best way to handle the increase in fragmentation. Larger area effect and/or higher killpower? Killpower is a combination of blast effect (to destroy things in cover) and fragmentation. It's not just fragmentation alone.

Interesting data on the German 81mm mortar shell. Again, the weight of these fragments are extremely small. Even with very high velocities, their odd shapes and low quality metal would not make them great armor penetrators.